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April 2018

After years of shrinking their wheat acres, U.S. farmers indicate they’ll be planting more — though not in Montana, the nation’s third largest wheat state, federal officials estimate.

Farmers shared their planting intentions with the U.S. Department of Agriculture earlier this month. The results, released Thursday, show Montana farmers expect to plant 190,000 fewer wheat acres, while nationally the intended wheat acres increased 3 percent to 47.3 million.

SEATTLE (AP) — Dee Gordon isn’t known for hitting home runs, and before this year he’d never played the outfield. But on Sunday, his power and his glove in center field led the Seattle Mariners to a 5-4 win against the Cleveland Indians.

Gordon, who has never hit more than four homers in a season, led off the seventh inning with a tiebreaking shot to right off Dan Otero (0-1). Gordon clearly knew he’d hit it well — after making contact, he watched the ball and walked out of the batter’s box.

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (AP) — East Tennessee State placed recently hired football coach Randy Sanders on paid administrative leave Monday while it investigates a “potential violation of university policy.”

No other details were provided in the one-sentence statement. Sanders was hired Dec. 17 to replace Carl Torbush, who announced his retirement at the end of the 2017 season. Torbush had been ETSU’s coach since 2015, when the school relaunched the football program it had shut down for financial reasons in 2003.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist in her own right whose reputation was sullied by scandal, has died. She was 81.

The woman many South Africans once described as the “Mother of the Nation” and a champion of the black majority, died “surrounded by her family and loved ones,” according to a statement released by Madikizela-Mandela’s family.

Madikizela-Mandela was the second of Mandela’s three wives, married to him from 1958 to 1996.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel said Monday it has reached an agreement with the United Nations to scrap its contested plans to deport African asylum seekers and will resettle many of them in Western countries instead.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the “unprecedented understandings” with the U.N. refugee agency would send more than 16,000 migrants to various Western countries that are willing to absorb them. It said the new deal would be implemented in three stages over five years, with many of those remaining in Israel integrated and granted official status.

Scientists monitoring the craft’s disintegrating orbit had forecast the craft would mostly burn up and would pose only the slightest of risks to people. Analysis from the Beijing Aerospace Control Center showed it had mostly burned up.